February 11, 2004
By Hamza Hendawi
Associated Press
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Foreign Islamic fighters in Iraq want to accelerate their anti-U.S. campaign by attacking Kurds, kidnapping U.S. soldiers and trying to “control land at night,” according to a letter from an operative to al-Qaida leaders intercepted by the U.S. military. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter, which the military announced Monday it had found on an al-Qaida operative captured in Iraq.
The letter’s author says the insurgency is in a “race against time” to wreck American plans to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30. If it fails to prevent that, “then there will be no choice but to pack our bags and move to another land where we can once again carry our banner.”
He also complains that Iraqi insurgents battling the Americans have not cooperated enough with foreign fighters and outlines a strategy to attack Shiites in order to spark a sectarian war that Sunni Muslims will join.
The military believes Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant thought to be linked to al-Qaida, wrote the document. The letter, 11 pages long in Arabic, is written in flowery prose and addressed to “our two kind brothers,” whom it also refers to as the “men in the mountains.”
It is thought to have been sent to senior al-Qaida leaders, perhaps Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who are believed hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan or western Pakistan.
Insurgents must act quickly to prevent the handover of power to Iraqi police and military forces, since Iraqi fighters would be less willing to attack them, the letter’s author says. “The noose is beginning to tighten around the necks of the mujahedeen, and the future is frightening with the future deployment of more troops and police,” he writes.
“Our hope is for the pace of our work to accelerate, to form brigades and battalions that have experience and perseverance and to wait for zero hour, when we begin to appear in public and control the land at night and, God willing, also during the day,” he says.
The document vows to target “symbols” of the Kurdish community and to increase attacks on troops, police men and “collaborators” — Iraqis who work with the U.S.-led coalition.
It calls Americans “the most cowardly of God’s creatures,” saying, “We ask God to enable us to get at them, either through killing them or capturing them to swap them for our sheiks and brothers in detention.”
But it says the “only solution” is to repeatedly attack the Shiites to prompt them into retaliating against Sunnis.
“If we succeed in dragging them into the sectarian battlefield, the slumbering Sunnis will wake up,” the letter says.
The author rails against Kurds and Shiites, saying Kurdish leaders have turned northern Iraq into a “Trojan horse for Israelis.” It brands Shiites as “heretics” aiming to create a Shiite state “extending from Iran, passing by Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and ending with the cardboard kingdom of the Gulf” — an apparent reference to Saudi Arabia.
He also says Iraqi fighters are hesitant about carrying out suicide attacks and restrict themselves to planting explosives and firing rockets. Some Iraqi fighters “brag among themselves that none of them had been killed or captured. We have repeatedly told them that safety and victory don’t go together.”